Tom Brady has stepped away from Birmingham City, leaving the Championship club just three years after taking a minority stake.
The Blues confirmed the news in a statement, expressing “sincere gratitude to Tom Brady for his involvement and unwavering support for the club over the last three years”.
The club added: “It was amazing to have someone with Tom’s experience and passion associated with the club, and the club looks forward to continuing on that foundation from the training ground to the Birmingham community.”
The American football legend first joined in the summer of 2023 as part of the takeover led by billionaire Tom Wagner’s Knighthead Capital investment group.
Brady’s arrival in English football was met with considerable fanfare, including a five-part Amazon documentary showcasing the new ownership’s ambitions for the Midlands outfit.
The series, titled “Built in Birmingham: Brady and the Blues,” offered viewers an inside look at the group’s plans to overhaul the club from top to bottom.
The fly-on-the-wall series also showed some of the more controversial decisions made during the early months of the new regime, particularly surrounding managerial appointments that would come to define Brady’s turbulent spell at St Andrew’s.
One of the most damaging episodes of Brady’s tenure was the decision to dismiss head coach John Eustace and replace him with Wayne Rooney, a move that quickly unravelled.
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The Amazon documentary captured Brady observing a Rooney-led team meeting and training session at the club’s training ground, then voicing his concerns before being driven away.
“I’m a little worried about our head coach’s work ethic,” Brady told his business manager, Ben Rawitz, who responded: “Comes across as lackadaisical.”
Rooney lasted a mere 83 days in the dugout before being sacked.
Brady later acknowledged the error, saying he had ignored advice not to make “sweeping changes” so early in his time at the club.
He said: “I had good advice: ‘Don’t go in there and make sweeping changes. You guys have time.’
“But we made sweeping changes that put us in decline. That was our doing.”
Beyond the boardroom drama, Brady’s time at Birmingham was marked by a massive infrastructure shift.
The ownership group earmarked £3billion for a so-called “Sports Quarter” – a 20-year megaproject spanning a 48-acre site in the east of the city.
At its centrepiece sits a planned 60,000-capacity stadium and new training facilities, constructed above a network of underground transport tunnels.
Steven Knight, the creator of Peaky Blinders and a lifelong Birmingham supporter, is understood to be collaborating on the project to make it “one of the most-talked-about stadium designs ever”.
However, the timeline has already hit setbacks, with the projected completion date moving from 2029 to 2031 since the plans were first unveiled.
Brady’s exit comes as the Blues sit in first place in the Championship as the season heads into its final international break of the year.
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